A learning culture is a winning culture

Culture is one of the most important assets of your business. Why? Culture defines the way you think, work, communicate and differentiate yourself from competitors. And it is actually a scientifically proved fact. As Professor. Emeritus James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with “culturally unremarkable” competitors.

Which kind of culture matters the most to your business? It depends, but according to what we have seen from observing the training industry, the more the business invests in education, the better it performs. Why? Because a learning culture is a winning culture.

The numbers that tell you all.

A report from trainingindustry.com showed that businesses around the world spent $355.6 billion in corporate training in 2015, which is 10.4% more than the previous year. Another report from the US market also shows that the average time an employee spends on training is 53.8 hours per year, which means more than 1 hour per week on training and personal development. Not convincible enough? 95% of hiring managers consider employee training to be the key retention tool.

Why should you care?

The urges to change and to be different: The world is changing every day with all the new technologies, new trends and new competitors to the market, which requires businesses to develop their own uniqueness in order to win. Adoption of new skills and knowledge is nowaday considered a key surviving tool not only to follow up with the new things but also to create new trends and drive profit to your business.

A culture of winning: Knowledge builds up confidence and confidence is the source of ambition and success.

Have you thought of an ideal workplace that you wanted to create? It is more difficult to hire an ideal employee than to create one. By providing learning and self-development opportunities for all your employees, you are creating your working environment filled with people you want to work with.

How to create a learning culture at work?

Honor the nature of learning: in your organization, learning should be given as an opportunity equally to all employees. More importantly, your employees need to have the feeling of being encouraged and empowered to learn more and develop themselves better. It should not be forced by any mean.

Make learning easy and accessible: give your employees the access to e-learning tools or a corporate training marketplace like Panda that allows them to customize their needs for learning and search for a trainer in no time.

Evaluate performances based on learning: employee’s participation in learning and self-development usually results in their performance. Therefore, learning should be included in their evaluation also.

Final thoughts:

If your actions inspire other to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader - John Quincy Adam

No matter in which industry you are, your employees have the potential to drive your business to a totally different level and what matters the most is how to fuel them with knowledge and ambition to do so. Learning is the answer.